Hearing all this, the king was as much alarmed as delighted: delighted that his daughter had taken a living Buddha for a husband, alarmed that the three of them were in truth demon spirits.

The novel puts his two feelings in a matched pair so that they sit exactly level with each other — 喜的是 against 驚的是, the thing that delights him against the thing that frightens him. He is not weighing them up. He is holding both. And he is right about both. A living Buddha is exactly what his daughter has married, and the three attendants are exactly what he thinks they are.

In the midst of his alarm and delight, an astrologer from the Board suddenly reported, "The wedding date is settled for the twelfth day of this month of this year, a rén-zǐ day of good hours. The chart is clear all round, and it is fitting to make the match."

The 陰陽官 is the state astrologer, and his job is picking dates — an office that existed, with a bureau and a payroll, for most of Chinese history. 壬子 is a day in the sixty-day cycle Chinese has used to count days since the Bronze Age, running two lists against each other the way a lock's tumblers line up. 周堂 is the wedding almanac chart proper: a diagram checked to make sure the day puts nothing harmful in the path of bride, groom or their families. He is reporting that it comes up clean.

The king said, "And what day is today?" The astrologer reported, "Today is the eighth, a wù-shēn day — the Monkey Offers Fruit. It is a fitting day for advancing the worthy and taking up business."

Here is the best joke in the chapter, and it goes past in four characters. Chinese almanacs give each day a name, and the name of this one is 猿猴獻果, the Monkey Offers Fruit. The court astrologer says it out loud, in a formal report, as a reason the day is favourable — while standing in a room that contains an actual monkey who has just finished explaining that he used to be in charge of the peach orchard of Heaven. Nobody in the scene notices. The reader is not told to notice. It is simply left there.

Greatly pleased, the king at once ordered the duty officer to sweep out the halls, pavilions and towers of the royal garden, and asked the Prince Consort and his three eminent disciples to rest there, so that in due course the wedding feast could be laid on and the princess given in marriage. All obeyed respectfully, the king withdrew from the hall, and the officials all dispersed. Of that no more.

The scene closes on housekeeping, which is how this novel usually signals that the trap has finished being built. 合巹 is the central rite of a Chinese wedding: a gourd cut in two, and the couple drink from the matching halves. The two halves fit each other and nothing else, which is the point. 不題 — of that no more — is the storyteller stepping in to change scene, one of the seams of oral performance the written novel kept.